The Brian May project
Simon Croft sets about wiring a guitar to recreate the sounds of the Queen legend’s Red Special!
A
s just about everyone and their guitar playing dog knows, Brian May’s preferred electric guitar throughout his career is the one
he built as a 16 year-old with help from his Dad, Harold. This month, I’m attempting to get some of Brian’s signature sounds from the Modocaster, the test-bed guitar I put together last month for precisely this kind of project. Without building a replica of the Red Special
from the ground up, I’m not going to able to nail every aspect of the tone. The first limitation is that I’m not Brian May, of course.
But also, the Modocaster has a longer scale length than the Red Special and it doesn’t have its unique tone chamber hidden in the body. And although I have a Vox Valvetronix, it won’t be a match for Brian’s bank of AC30s overdriven by his treble booster. That’s enough on what we can’t do this month;
let’s look at what we can. My main focus will be on the Red Special’s unusual six-switch wiring scheme, but it’s not the whole story. Two aspects of Brian’s design that sometimes get
ignored – but will affect the sound – are the relative distance from the bridge of the three pickups, and their height from the strings. The distance of the pickups from the bridge will
affect the harmonics they pickup. I’ve copied my pickup spacings from the Red Special and they look kinda weird on a longer scale guitar but I’m hoping it will help to capture ‘that’ sound. (I’ve also included a ‘proportional’ scaled-up pickup template
that may be more appropriate to your guitar in the online PDF.)
I believe that the correct heights for the pickups
are the bridge position highest, then the middle and neck progressively lower, so that they have equal volume. Again, I’ve followed that.
Six switch trick As a hyper-intelligent schoolboy, Brian May chose to wire his pickups in series (Figure 1). The advantage of this scheme is that switching in more pickups makes for a bigger tone. In fact, some combinations form humbuckers. But it does complicate things a little on the wiring front. Most three-pickup guitars – such as a Fender Strat – are wired in parallel. This produces quite delicate, airy tones when you have more than one pickup in circuit.
Another characteristic of parallel wiring is that it is simpler, because switching off one pickup doesn’t switch off any other. Take another look at Figure 1 and you’ll realise that cutting the connections to one pickup cuts the entire circuit, so none of the pickups would work.
The radical solution Brian came up with is shown (Fig. 2). There are three on/off switches that short across unwanted pickups, so that the other pickups continue to work. (That’s the top row.) Then there are three phase reverse switches, which help to make some of the distinctive, more ‘hollow’ tones the Red Special can deliver. (Bottom row.)
The switches I’ve used don’t look much like the ones on the Red Special (fig. 3), but electrically, they’re identical. Technically, they are sub-miniature Double-Pole, Double Throw (DPDT) and you can buy them in Maplins. They come in two varieties and the right ones for this job are ‘on-on’, not the ones with a ‘centre off’ position.
Fig. 3 - Space is so tight when wiring these switches that the easiest way to hold wires in place while you solder them is to use a matchstick. (‘Brymay’ long kitchen matches are a good fit, weirdly enough!)
VOL
Choosing the best switch size is a pay-off. The ones I’ve used take up less room inside the guitar but they were fiddly to solder and could be a bit scary to use on stage if you’re used to dealing with standard toggle/slider switches. (The initial wiring took me about three hours and even then it didn’t work. I traced it easily enough to one of about 40 solder joints but this is a labour of love…) Alternatively, you can find bigger DPDT switches on line. They’ll be easier to wire and to operate but they will take up a lot of space in your guitar’s body rout. I had to cut a bit more space in the Modocaster to fit all six switches and the Seymour Duncan pot/pickup wiring system.
CAP TONE
Fig. 1 - The Red Special’s pickups are wired in series. This creates some great tones but means that simply cutting a pickup out of the circuit would silence the whole guitar.
40 3pickup
Fig. 2 - The Red Special’s on/off switches short across a pickup’s terminals to switch it off. The lower switches reverse phase.
Picking the pickups There are a number of ways of getting hold of appropriate pickups. One is to wait until you come across genuine vintage Burns Tri-Sonics like Brian bought when they were new. That could be a long wait! Fortunately Burns currently offers authentic Tri-Sonics in three varieties: Tri-Sonic Vintage and
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